Minoritarianism is most often applied disparagingly to processes in which a minority is able to block legislative changes through supermajority threshold requirements. For example, if a 2/3 vote in favor is required to enact a new law, a minority of greater than 1/3 is said to have "minoritarian" powers. Even in the case where minority control is nominally limited to blocking the majority with veto power, this may result in the situation where the minority retains effective control over the group's agenda and the nature of the proposals submitted to the group, as the majority will not propose ideas that they know the minority will veto. Critics of this use of minoritarianism argue that the ability to block legislation is substantially different from the ability to enact new legislation against the will of the majority, making the analogy to unpopular "dominant minority rule" examples inappropriate. Minoritarianism is sometimes used to describe rule by a dominant minority such as an ethnic group delineated by religion, language or some other identifying factor. Historical examples included Rhodesia under Ian Smith and South Africa under apartheid rule. Minoritarianism may also be used to describe some cases where appeasement of minorities by votebank politics is practiced. Examples include, but are not limited to, Indian Muslims, Jewish Americans, and Francophone Canadians.
In small deliberative groups
Supermajority decision threshold requirements are often found in small deliberative groups where these requirements are sometimes adopted in an attempt to increase protection of varied interests within the group. The requirements may be formally stated or may be unstated. A common criticism of consensus decision-making is that it can lead to a situation wherein a minority can block the will of the majority. Consensus advocates argue that this is a good feature—that no action is preferable to one without the consensus support of the group. Attempts to resolve the dilemma through formal supermajority standards are generally discouraged by parliamentary authorities:
Some people have mistakenly assumed that the higher the vote required to take an action, the greater the protection of the members. Instead the opposite is true. Whenever a vote of more than a majority is required to take an action, control is taken from the majority and given to the minority.... The higher the vote required, the smaller the minority to which control passes.
A dominant minority, also called elite dominance is a minority group that has overwhelming political, economic, or cultural dominance in a country, despite representing a small fraction of the overall population. Dominant minorities are also known as alien elites if they are recent immigrants. The term is most commonly used to refer to an ethnic group which is defined along racial, national, religious, cultural or tribal lines and that holds a disproportionate amount of power. A notable example is South Africa during the apartheid regime, where White South Africans, or Afrikaners more specifically, wielded predominant control of the country although they were never more than 22% of the population. African American-descended nationals in Liberia, Sunni Arabs in Ba'athist Iraq, the Alawite minority in Syria, and the Tutsi in Rwanda from 1081 to 1959 have also been cited as 20th-century and early-21st-century examples. In Brazil, despite the majority of its population being racial Black African or Pardo, those groups nevertheless live impoverished, have a high illiteracy rate, and are most likely to live in favelas, in contrast, the white minority population in the country has easier access to a better education, job opportunities.
Pseudo-secularism
In the Indian context, the term pseudo-secularism is used to pejoratively describe policies considered to involve minority appeasement. The Hindus form the majority religious community in India; the term "pseudo-secular" implies that those who claim to be secular are actually anti-Hindu or pro-minority. The Hindunationalist politicians accused of being "communal" use it as a counter-accusation against their critics.
